Digital Stories, by Katy, age 30
My winning comment card
This post is partly a shameless pat on the back to myself. Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Ruth Horry, very kindly took me as her date to the Wellcome Collection’s ‘1 year re-open party’. It was a very enjoyable evening during which, in true Wellcome style, we were encouraged to contribute comment cards on our highlight from 2015. I was excited recently to discover that I'd won a prize for the best highlight. Thanks for the sparkling wine Wellcome!
But, this also galvanised me to write a long-intended post about my Wellcome highlight. My comment card said 'The Digital Stories, what a great new way to engage with content.' There are two such Digital Stories by Wellcome so far, and I hope more to come. ‘Mindcraft’ looks at the history of attitudes to madness and mental health. ‘The Collectors’ looks at the history of collecting and the power of curiosity that drove some famous acquirers of things, including Henry Wellcome. As I said on the card, I think these are a really wonderful new way to engage with museum content.
These are long-form digital, creating a story with a series of chapters, through which the user navigates to explore Wellcome collections and themes. You experience the collections in different ways. Some chapters focus in on an image, with hotspots to click to find out more. At other points you click through to a gallery of related images or film with a talking head. Some parts are animated automatically, some by the user’s actions.
A few of my personal favourites are: where different experts' responses to a demonstration of mesmerism are reimagined as a Twitter conversation; where you can explore the different objects in a typical 'cabinet of curiosities' through hotspots on a printed image; or the animated reimagining of Francis Bacon's 'Salomon's House' in his New Atlantis.
These digital stories work so well because they are experiences in their own right, unconnected to exhibitions and displays at the Wellcome Collection. They draw you in and certainly encourage further exploration of the collections in person, but equally connect you out to other collections, stories and areas of interest. This, to me, is the future of digital content, adding a whole independent layer to the museum experience.